La sfida impossibile. I partiti di fronte alla crisi di legittimazione

This paper deals with the challenges political parties are facing in contemporary democracy. Some criticisms goes back in the centuries, others are linked to the recent evolution of the Western societies. The most enduring difficulty comes from a sort of “ontological” strain: the political party is contested because it embodies the partiality. The public opinion longs for unity and the conflicts among parties and within them produce a negative feeling. More recently, parties are under attack because they do not any longer fulfil what the mass public demands, that is, to go back to the party organization and working of the 1950s. The folk theory about the political party developed in the immediate WWII afterward has created of logic of appropriateness of the political party that still ebbed them. However, as political parties live today in a completely different environment they cannot follow that prescription and this damages their reputation which in fact enjoys a very low consideration all over Europe.